ournikova was born in Moscow in the former Soviet Union to Alla and Sergei Kournikov; she and her mother later emigrated to the United States. Currently, she resides in Miami Beach, Florida, and plays in occasional exhibitions and in doubles for the St. Louis Aces of World Team Tennis.

Today, women compete professionally and as amateurs in virtually every major sport, though the level of participation typically decreases when it comes to the more violent contact sports.

Thus, women's soccer was originally dominated by the U.S., China, and Norway, who have historically fielded weak men's national teams—although more recently, several nations with strong and even dominant men's national teams, such as Germany, Sweden, and Brazil, have established themselves as women's powers.

Tennis was the most popular professional female sport from the 1970s onward, and it provided the occasion for a symbolic "battle of the sexes" between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, enhancing the profile of female athletics. The success of women's tennis, however, did little to help the fortunes of women's professional team sports.

There are other variations besides the ones listed below, but races of unusual length (e.g. 300 m) are run much less often. The unusual races are typically held during indoor season because of the shorter 200 m indoor track.

In the United States, nearly all schools required student participation in sports, guaranteeing that all girls were exposed to athletics at an early age, which was generally not the case in Western Europe and Latin America.

Track and field athletics, commonly known as athletics or track and field, is a collection of sports events that involve running, throwing and jumping. The name "athletics" is derived from the Greek word "athlos", meaning "contest".

Due to a relative lack of public interest in female athletics, most early women's professional sports leagues foundered, so amateur competitions became the primary venue for women's sports.

he modern Olympics had female competitors from 1900 onward, though women at first participated in considerably fewer events.

Few women competed in sports until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as social changes in Europe and North America favored increased female participation in society as equals with men.